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Pac-Man Kart Rally

"This kind of multiplayer game won’t work well in a cloud model, because the experience depends entirely on real-time responsiveness."

– Brian Spencer, Sr. Engineer, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc.

Highlights

NAMCO BANDAI Games converts popular, single-player game into multiplayer version in less than 10 days using AllJoyn™ SDK

Application Story

NAMCO BANDAI Games created PAC-MAN Kart Rally as a single-player Android game to pit its iconic character against other well-known personalities in its gaming portfolio. Kart Rally tests the player’s driving skills on a variety of courses, with several modes of high-performance maneuvers like power-sliding, speed boosts and power-ups.

As a racing game, Kart Rally was ripe for a peer-to-peer (P2P) multiplayer version, but it seemed too demanding for normal cellular connections. Rather than try to build in all the networking smarts needed for P2P – service discovery, device discovery, pairing, security, transient devices and ad hoc connections – NAMCO BANDAI turned to AllJoyn.

Within about ten days, NAMCO’s developers implemented and tested AllJoyn’s real-time, ad hoc P2P networking capabilities, upgraded Kart Rally to take advantage of the gaming controls on their target device and added functionality for up to four players. Kart Rally’s gaming experience depends on tight responsiveness among players, and AllJoyn greatly reduces latency by connecting devices directly through proximal networks like WiFi, instead of through a cloud solution.

PAC-MAN Kart Rally is an example of taking an existing, single-player game and creating an entirely new market for it as a multiplayer title. Developers can leave all of the heavy lifting of real-time, proximity-based, P2P networking to AllJoyn, and focus on enhancing the user interface, logic and interactivity for new audiences.

Your turn. In less than two weeks, NAMCO BANDAI developers had a working game for up to four players. Whether you want to create your own real-time P2P game from scratch or modify an existing app for real-time P2P gameplay, download the AllJoyn SDK and get started.